


They're Always Poppin' Their Cork

by executrix



Category: Billions (TV), Blakes7
Genre: Community: intoabar, Crossover, F/M, Implied Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24636700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: After a stint at Ace Cap and an interview at Mase Cap, Servalan (who Happens to Like New York) decides not to become a hedgie
Relationships: Servalan/Ben Kim, Servalan/Michael Wagner
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: A Ficathon Goes Into A Bar





	They're Always Poppin' Their Cork

_Who wants to live in New York?  
Who wants the garbage, the dirt, the noise, the heat? […]  
They’re always poppin’ their cork,  
The cops, the cabbies, the salesgirls up at Saks.  
Ya gotta have a real taste for maniacs.  
Suddenly, I do. _ (Sondheim, “Merrily We Roll Along”)

1  
“I don’t think you should touch that, ma’am,” the mutoid said, as Servalan stretched out her hand to grab the hideous heathen idol, from which an eldritch light pulsed. “Not until the forensic team has had a chance to ascertain its safety.”

“I don’t pay you to think,” Servalan said, grunting a little as she dislodged the idol from the altar it sat on. She tucked it under her arm, and was going to carry it out of the tomb until she decided it was too heavy and cast about for someone else to carry it. 

“If we set aside the question of whether I am in the pay of any individual rather than serving the Federation, I am not paid at all,” the mutoid said. “The provision of serum is pursuant to my assigned tasks.”  
For only a moment, Servalan thought that if she never saw another mutoid again, it would be too soon. Then the mutoid winced, as the eldritch light grew blinding and a horrendous chortle boomed and bounced off the rough stone walls.

Twelve hours later, when the mutoid and a Space Second Lieutenant returned without Servalan or an explanation that received any credence whatsoever, the mutoid was decommissioned and the Space Second Lieutenant was Modified (a wash transaction for the Mutoid Corps). Three days later, there was a new Supreme Commander, and two Admirals, a Senator, eight colonels, and quite a few enlisted personnel and junior officers were dead. This was a greater attrition rate than Blake ever achieved in a comparably short period of time. 

2  
Servalan crinkled her nose at the battery of horrible smells, then squeezed her eyes shut against the assault of bright light. When she opened her eyes, she discovered that she was sitting down, with the idol in her lap. She looked up, and saw…sky. She flinched, at the realization that there was no Dome overhead. She was surrounded by…buildings. Astonishingly tall buildings. Badly dressed people were rushing past on the pavement, and unimaginable amounts of Personal Transport occupied the road between the pavements. 

No one paid her the slightest attention, because it would take a lot more than a woman sitting on the curb in a (muddy, bedraggled) white satin gown and clutching a statute with a lot of tentacles to surprise anyone in midtown Manhattan. 

“Very amusing,” she told the statue. “Now take me home.” She would have sworn that the thing’s hideous maw twisted into a sneer before its eyes flashed once and went dead. She stared it in the face, but knew that whatever power it had ever had was now fled. 

She had been there for several minutes, and all or nearly all of the passers-by appeared to be human. They were not wearing breathing apparatus. (Later on, of course, they would be wearing non-breathing apparatus.) So she decided the atmosphere, unpleasant as it was, must be tolerable by humans. There were poles at the street corners, and signs on buildings, in Standard characters. There was a moving sign high up on one of the buildings that informed her it was…2017. This was confirmed by the bundled papers within metal boxes. Several of them referred to New York, a place that she had vaguely heard of and assumed was legendary.

In her experience, once a World was terraformed and included an actual city more spacious and complex than a single underground bunker, there would be a commercial district. And at the fringes of the commercial district there would be a…district of less reputable commerce. She held the idol up to her face, eye-to-eye, and said, “I’m giving you one last chance, and then you’re for the jump.” Nothing happened, so she hiked until she found a suitably grimy pawn shop. She left with a wad of cash and without the idol or her diamond bracelet. There were many small stalls at sidewalk level, so she was able to buy a pouch on a string to carry the money in. 

There were stores selling clothing of many strange designs and patterns. Servalan was delighted to see that low-necked, ankle-length dresses were freely available, although she wasn’t entirely sure about the bright colors and shrieking patterns. She also bought a pair of high-heeled sandals with jewels on the straps matching her earrings, but no underwear, because she never wore it at home, so why start now?  
Servalan walked down the street, swinging the bright-yellow carrier bags. She walked by a pharmacy, then went in, mesmerized by its amazing array of cosmetics and unguents. She bought two bottles of Essie nail polish and mopped a Pixi makeup palette. 

She walked back in the more salubrious direction, and went into a bar. “I’m not from here,” she told the bartender. “What would you recommend I order?” Although a green bottle, high up on a shelf and dusty, looked familiar, nothing else did. “Espresso martini,” he said immediately. 

Servalan took a demure sip, approvingly, and looked around, her eyes gradually adapting to the dark room. There was a young man sitting at the bar, looking rather dejected. Servalan thought she could do something with that. He wasn’t bad looking, although even after her brief tenure in the twenty-first century Servalan could tell there was something not quite right about his clothes. (Once she discovered television, she diagnosed that a Queer Eye would have come in handy.) 

She waved imperiously at the bartender. “Send one of these over to him.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw another one of the few patrons in the bar hand a small rectangle of plasteel to the bartender, who put it into a small device and then handed it back. She surmised that it must be a credit chip, and usable in lieu of the pieces of paper in the pouch.

Ben Kim looked up from his Coors Light. He had just wasted three hours at a dog-and-pony show at the McGraw-Hill Building that was a pointless attempt to raise capital for fracking in sub-Sahara Africa. He was engaged in contemplating whether he could sneak into the Radio City Music Hall without anybody he knew seeing him. It wasn’t anywhere near Christmas, but he just loved the Rockettes.

“Me? Really?” Servalan nodded. Between his befuddlement, his haircut and his air of intelligence, she made a Sherlockian leap of surmise. She decided he was a comptech, and accordingly unfamiliar with talking with girls. (Back home, she had deduced from Anna’s reports that Avon might have been an exception, and perhaps even had at least one girlfriend who was not, so to speak, Government Issue.) 

While her brain clicked away learning facts about her new habitation, she gazed wide-eyed at him and, at intervals, said, “That sounds fascinating! Tell me more about it!” She experienced a moment of genuine interest, but it evaporated when it turned out that the War Town he referred to incessantly was actually some sort of educational institution.

The bartender thought that he’d have to cut them off soon if they didn’t order some food, so he walked over to the booth where they had decamped. “Lucian in the kitchen does a great bacon cheeseburger,” he said. “I liked the ‘espresso martini ‘you recommended,’” Servalan said. “So, certainly.” Ben nodded. “Steak fries or salad? Want to live a little?” “I always want to live…a lot,” Servalan said. “Make it two,” Ben said. He was impressed: from what he gathered from the guys he knew who dated models, they never ate, certainly not fries. 

When the burgers arrived, the savory aroma startled Servalan out of her pantomime of absorption. One, and perhaps two kinds of genuine meat were cradled between two rounds of bread product that resembled neither the hardtack of field rations nor the coarse gray bread of the Dome. Her first bite forced out an ecstatic grunt that she monitored for re-use later in the evening. 

Ben’s trip to the restroom (prolonged because one of the other patrons came in, so Ben had to hide in a stall) gave Servalan a chance to go through his jacket. There was nothing in his wallet except one of what Servalan had recently learned was called a “hundred-dollar bill,” and several of the plasteel rectangles. Ben had absorbed his mother’s injunctions to his sisters to be sure to carry taxi money, although not why he did not receive this advice directly. 

Since there was only one bill, Servalan thought Ben would miss it if she took it, but he might not miss one of the rectangles. Luck was with her. The card she took was an Axe Cap corporate credit card. Ben actually never opened his wallet—he paid for everything with phone apps—and he wouldn’t have noticed the absence of the corporate card even if Servalan had kept it much longer. 

“I wonder,” Servalan asked, “If you know anyplace—and could introduce me—where there are games of chance? “

Ben wondered if this was racist and offensive and she thought he was Chinese so he would like to gamble and also was a lousy driver and had a little dick. (Actually Ben *was* a lousy driver—he skipped Driver’s Ed in high school because by the time he was old enough to take the class, it conflicted with practice for the award-winning Math Team. He didn’t learn until he was at Stanford and had to go places he couldn’t reach on his bicycle.) He decided it was OK to tell her that he did know a poker game nearby, in the Diamond District. His card-counting abilities had come in handy when he was still paying off student loans.  
Ben’s phone paid for the many rounds of drinks and the burgers. It was late enough for the shutters on the jewelry store windows to be in place. Otherwise Servalan might have stood for hours, mesmerized by window after window blazing with diamonds. Servalan won a few thousand dollars, then yawned and put her hand over Ben’s on the green baize table. “Let’s go to your place,” she said. “I could go to my hotel, of course, but it’s too tiresome arguing with them about whatever happened to my luggage.” She hefted the carrier bags. “At least I could pick up a few things.”

Ben gulped. “Sure,” he said, “Uhhh…what’s your name?”

“Sara,” she said. “Sara Vallan.” They went to Ben’s apartment where, for her ordinary she paid, not her heart, but about four minutes of her time. Servalan reflected that, while this new epoch in which she found herself apparently lacked interstellar travel, their mattress game was on point. 

The next morning, she put on one of her new dresses, and convinced Ben that the strict no-visitors rule at Axe Cap was just an amusing barrier to be hurtled. She had never heard of the Rothschild who refused to lend money to an acquaintance, but promised to walk the full length of the Stock Exchange in his company. Her version was to stride out of the elevator with her arm around Ben’s waist, her hand tucked into his back pocket. Ben blushed, as the other analysts whistled and applauded. 

Servalan lurked until the receptionist took a bathroom break, then followed her. She brandished $500 from her poker winnings. The receptionist got a free choice between quitting immediately to take care of a family medical emergency, or being the emergency she could pretend to see. 

Three days later, Servalan took out the company credit card, which had already been used to purchase the foundations of a new wardrobe, a burner phone, and a Chromebook, wiped it on a fold of her skirt to remove fingerprints, and dropped it on the carpet near Ben’s chair, where it could perhaps have fallen out of his jacket. 

Unlike Avon who was able to master teleport technology immediately, with nothing but a handful of post-it notes, Servalan found it rather difficult to figure out the office phone system. On her second day on the job, it came as something of a welcome respite to be called into the HR department. Wags happened to be passing by and heard her explain her lack of a driver’s license by cooing that it had been taken away for Influential Driving. He found this a charming locution. Every time he re-read “The Right Stuff,” he imagined himself not merely conquering Space but drinking and driving, driving and drinking.  
When asked to produce proof of citizenship for Form I-9, Servalan arranged a diversion by tilting her head, saying, “Oh! I can hear Mr. Spiros’ espresso machine! I’m just off to fetch you one!” She correctly assumed that multiple other crises would intervene and Kevin from HR would forget all about it. 

Servalan’s last semester at Federation Space Academy had been spent on secondment to Central Security, so she knew how to construct a legend. She avoided the newbie error of stealing the identity of a dead person. True, the victim was unlikely to turn up to protest. But it was much easier to explain why one was not in Wichita as voting and credit card records suggested than to explain why one appeared to be breathing without official sanction. Among the multiple Sara Vallans to choose from, she reluctantly picked the one two years older than she was. The photographs online looked vaguely like her. They were more or less the same height and, like most people, had brown eyes. Differences in weight or hair color could be finessed, and even facial changes could be attributed to having a little work done—before it was needed, of course. 

Servalan was surprised to discover that a private firm could not only afford its own psychostrategist, but would be permitted to employ one. Wendy Rhoades’ somewhat reclusive manner contrasted greatly with Carnell’s. Servalan decided to stay as far out of Wendy’s path as possible, in case she were actually any good at her job and detected Servalan’s failure to exist in the contemporary timeline. Because Axe Capital cared very little about the performance of its receptionists, so that wasn’t too difficult. Servalan admired Wendy’s deployment of clothing, hair, makeup, and perfume (though, in Wendy’s place, Servalan would have owned a lot more clothes; she assumed that a “capsule wardrobe” was what you kept in a pillbox to do away with competitors). 

But, once she read Wendy as a sadist, Servalan looked down on her a little. Servalan considered both sex and violence to be excellent, powerful weapons, but she thought it was a big mistake to mix them up.

3

Axe blinked. The pretty girl draped over Wags looked sort of familiar. The next time Wags headed for the john, Axe braced him in the hallway.

“Fucksake, Wags,” he said. “What about the Sandwich Rule?”

“Like the Pirate’s Code, more of a suggestion. Anyway, Sara doesn’t work for us anymore. As I learned and grew as a person on those unfortunate occasions, it was necessary to keep my conduct impeccable the whole time she worked for us—ineptly, may I add. And it was after her departure for quite legitimate performance-related reasons that I offered her some counseling and advice about her career prospects.” 

Servalan was glad to leave the apartment in Greenpoint that she had found on Craigslist. There were three roommates who squabbled constantly and obsessively labeled their food. One wrote on the containers with a china marker. The two would-be chefs used painter’s tape and Sharpies, although one of them cut the tape and the other one tore it. What passed for her bedroom was half of the former living room. It was divided down the middle with a couple of Janus-faced bookcases. Hooks were driven into the back of one bookcase; Servalan had access to the shelves of the other. There was a single bed, a horrible orange shag rug left behind by a years-ago tenant who appropriated it from the rumpus room of a grandmother who went into the nursing home. Servalan had a clothing rack, a nightstand, and that was all that fit into what could have been the austere cell of a cloistered nun with really, really bad taste. 

Wags set her up in a bijou flatlette on the Upper East Side. Not only did Servalan provide a most eligible plus-one for business events, she was a good sport about reporting back the insider information carelessly revealed by C-Suite denizens who happily babbled to anyone who was willing to listen to them and didn’t think that talking to women counted anyway.

The bed was king-sized. There was enough closet space for a plethora of gowns and cocktail dresses. Some of them were size 16, once Wags found out Servalan was OK with his wearing tires and mantles (and even tolerated blue eyeshadow, although you could tell she was making a sacrifice). Once she had drunk him to bed, Wags didn’t have a Sword Philippian she could wield in exchange. She did read his texts, though, and took to front-running the positions that Axe Cap was going to front-run.

Given the choice, Servalan would have abolished Viagra, but even so the job was not terribly onerous. Perhaps no one else would have detected a resemblance between Travis and Wags—a grim-visaged killer and a murderous pixie-- but Servalan admired their willingness to do anything at all to achieve what they wanted. Anyway, Travis’ affect might have been lighter if he had retained a larger complement of body parts.  
From time to time, Servalan thought of home. True, there she had tasted maximum power, and had the lives of millions of people in her hands. Here, she was just rich and frequently bored. But here, the things—even the things available to merely rich people—were so much better than even those available to the greediest of Alphas, and no one was trying to kill her. That had to count for something.

It took awhile, but she achieved her ambition to, once again, get couture clothes given to her for free. She became a regular at charitable functions where she could display a new $5,000 gown ( that was the retail price; she didn’t get that much when she re-sold it on The Real Real) each time. Servalan also became a generous campaign contributor to both parties, particularly down-ticket, where the politicians, like the mani-pedis, were such a bargain.

4  
Servalan discovered, as she groped the eighteen inches between her pillow and the phone on her nightstand, that it was three a.m.

“Hey, I guess I drunk-dialed,” Ben said. “I miss you! You were so great! But I guess I shouldn’t complain when an alpha-er wolf takes my mate away. It should make me want to look for alpha—I mean, sure I always look for alpha, but to *be* alpha! Sara, now that I woke you up, huh?”

“Yes,” Servalan said, with a dangerous yawn. A yawn with a body count.

“I need some advice.”

Servalan clicked the phone to illuminate the room a little more (the switch for the lamp was a whole six inches further way, after all). “Of course, darling,” she said. “I hope we’ll always be friends.”

“Well, Doctor Wendy said I should stand up for myself, you know? Be more assertive. Do something really scary.”

“I’m flattered that you think calling me is so frightening.”

“No, not this. I have a really cool idea about why guys with Dutch passports are renting cars at the airport.”

Servalan sat bolt upright. This might be worth something.

“And there are some fund managers coming in. Axe wants them to put in a tranche. So I thought that I’d put some truly excellent beats on my phone, and follow them around and do a striptease. I thought about it, and I got so scared I almost passed out.”

“Well, darling, you *are* surprisingly jacked.”

“Does that mean.…no, I bet you don’t miss me at all. But I miss you. So, that means you think it’s a good idea?”

Servalan was going to point out that no, it was actually one of the worst ideas she had ever heard, and she had had surveillance on Blake. But instead, out of general principle, she said, “Audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!”

“Is that, like, ‘yes’ in French?”

“Axe didn’t get where he is by being a shrinking violet,” she said.

“Thanks!” Ben said. “You gave me the confidence to push right ahead!”

Servalan blocked his number, then sat up in bed, hugging her knees, and wondering why a bunch of Dutch guys were renting cars at the airport.

5  
Servalan hadn’t spent any more time with Taylor Mason when they still worked at Axe Cap than she had with Wendy Rhoades, but she hadn’t actively hidden from Taylor. It was unusual to see someone with an even greater dedication to short haircuts. Servalan thought Taylor could have been really pretty, or at least really handsome, with better coiffure and haberdashery. 

So, after Taylor broke away and opened their own shop, Servalan brought in records of her brokerage accounts and said that she’d been doing all right day-trading, but was interested in becoming an analyst.

“Why?” Taylor asked, with their customary bluntness. In fact, sometimes Servalan wondered if Taylor was another stranded time traveler. If so, Servalan prided herself on having adapted rather better.

Servalan blinked. Obviously, it was more fun to get big fees for managing the money of those temporarily had it, when all of the risk was on the suckers. In fact she had considered investment banking—where the main item of the advice for which the bankers were well-paid was “give us a lot of your stock”—but they were sticklers for formal qualifications that Servalan didn’t feel comfortable about home-brewing. 

“Apart from the collegial atmosphere—far more present here than at Axe Cap, of course—I would welcome the opportunity to take advantage of the opportunities available to those who can access very large tranches of capital.” 

“Tell me something about your trading philosophy.”

Servalan shrugged. Surely, when you never knew whose smartphone was transmitting, you wouldn’t say “Insider trading, and identifying the stupidest traders and doing the opposite.”  
“Oh, instinct,” she said, with the tinkling laugh of someone who goes to the Ascot for the millinery and sticks a pin into the racing form to pick her bets.

“This is a quant-based shop,” Taylor said. “Yes, your results are quite good for an amateur. But my staff are top-flight professionals, using the latest and best computer models—and, in fact, can create those models.”

“But Muffee,” Servalan said.

“Every rule has its exceptions. He does an extraordinary job with the customers, and he is an exceptionally loyal person.” At that, Servalan decided not to even try offering Taylor whatever dirt on Axe Cap she had garnered before moving on from Wags and buying a co-op of her own on East 74th Street. 

Servalan placed her hand (nails gelled half-black, half-white, like one of the fondant-covered cookies Servalan could seldom resist buying at the checkout counter of the fruit-and-vegetable store) over Taylor’s. “I could introduce you to my tailor,” she said, gesturing with her other hand toward the lapel of her fuchsia satin pantsuit. “I have the most wonderful little man in Chinatown.”

It’s not that Servalan thought it was impossible to get women to sleep with her, but it didn’t seem to turn them into absolute pudding-brained idiots the way it with men. She was mildly curious about whether a non-binary person would lose only half as many brain cells.

“Yes, I see,” Taylor said. “A line-for-line copy of Saint Laurent’s ‘le smoking’ from the…let’s see…1976 collection.” 

Servalan decided it was all for the best. Office drones did have to spend unsociable amounts of time in the office, and starting at unsociable hours.

6  
As 2019 wore on, Servalan grew increasingly frantic. She took the pandemic in her stride—after all, she’d *caused* a few in her time. But she knew, from the Ancient History exam she had copied from Maxine Thania, that the easy-to-remember year 2020 was the dividing line between the First and Second Calendars. As she recollected, President Bidet’s inauguration was attended by an *extremely* small crowd. His predecessor, a notoriously sore loser, took advantage of having the nuclear codes to give the world a Christmas present on his way out of the White House. Servalan shorted all her positions in September, so theoretically she got even richer, and her warning blog made her a bit of an Influencer. But in the end, like all Cassandras, she was not believed.


End file.
